Formal Biography, &c.

Flourish Klink creates transformative works of fiction and studies fans and fan cultures. She is the Chief Research Officer of Chaotic Good Studios and lives in New York and Boston with her spouse, Nick Montfort, and their dog Pepys.

Flourish earned a Masters in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Religion from Reed College. However, her professional life began years before her schooling. At age 13 she was one of the co-founders of FictionAlley.org, the first fanfiction site to be nominated for Webby and Prix Ars Electronica awards and (for a time) the largest archive of Harry Potter fanfiction on the web. In 2003, she was the web chair for Nimbus-2003, the first Harry Potter fan convention; her involvement with cons continued through 2012, when she served as lead organizer for a convention, Ascendio, and she served as a board member for the nonprofit fan organization HP Education Fanon (HPEF).

After completing her schooling, Flourish joined The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. as a partner and Chief Participation Officer. While with The Alchemists, she worked on a wide variety of projects, from consulting for the Coca-Cola Company to co-writing and co-producing the mobile game for the film Transcendence to planning the transmedia strategy for hit Hulu show East Los High. She then joined Chaotic Good Studios as a partner and Chief Research Officer. There, she leads the Fanalytics team in performing qualitative and quantitative analysis of fan cultures, provides strategic insight into building and maintaining evergreen fandoms, and works directly with writers and creators to help them understand their stories’ fans.

With Elizabeth Minkel, Flourish co-hosts the podcast Fansplaining. She was a founding director of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a nonprofit that helps ensure the ongoing maitenance, improvement and preservation of the tools and services crucial to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction. She has worked on several games as a writer, designer, producer and/or programmer and has written many works of fanfiction, as well as branching narratives and works of conceptual poetry. She has presented her work in the US, UK, France, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Canada.

Some things I’ve done, written, and made

Ongoing Projects

I’m one of the cohosts of Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom. Pitched to an audience of sophisticated fans, academics, and entertainment professionals alike, it seeks to examine fan cultures from an insider’s point of view.

Every Star Trek Ever is my project to read the complete Star Trek novels. There are nearly 800 by my count. I have read approximately 10% so far.

Alternity was a journal-based roleplaying game, essentially a collaborative writing project, based on Harry Potter. It ran seven years, in which authors wrote diaries about a Harry Potter alternate universe in real time. Documentation is forthcoming.

Muggle Studies is a parser-based work of interactive fiction. It won a XYZZY award for “Best Supplemental Materials” in 2012.

In The Sonnet Project, I read all of Shakespeare’s sonnets on video, making videos of them freely available online for the first time. (There has since been a “Sonnet Project” TV show, unrelated to me and my sonnet project. I recommend picking it up rather than my videos if you really want to explore the sonnets, as it has much higher production value.)